A VETERAN WORKER'S PLAY-DAYS.*

JUST the life-time of a generation has passed since the ant bar of Tom Brown's School-days began to send to the Spectator the letters descriptive of his Vacation Rambles, which we have published from year to year with the signature ‘. Vacuus Victor," from which a selection now brought together makes very pleasant holiday reading. Through almost all of them • there runs a note of genuine enjoyment, of genial and kindly observation, of a readiness, nay, even of an eagerness, to discern and record the best sides of the life into the midst of which his love of travel in holiday-times took him in various parts of Europe and America. Judge Hughes's professional work, first as barrister, and later in presiding over the Chester County Court, must have compelled him to see a good deal of the seamy side of human nature, and must have subjected any early views of his as to its ultimate perfectibility to very severe strains. But there is no indication in these letters of any modification of the writer's original mental attitude. As the time for the annual vacation has come round, it has found Mr. Hughes both as keen as ever to make the most of the recreation he had earned, and as sure as ever that men and women and still more children all over the world possessed a very considerable average allowance of good-will and of intel- ligence, with, as a rale, some national or local virtue super- added, though in no case to such a degree or measure as to • Vacation Rambles. By Thomas Hughes, Q.0. (" Vacuus Vidor "). London I Ma-mitlan and Co.

make him doubt that it was best to have been born an Englishman.

In view of the appalling situation with which Europe is now face to face in Turkey, it is sad to see—and yet, from another

point of view, the fact affords some considerable vindication of the policy pursued by this country in the Crimean War—

that so strong a Liberal as Mr. Hughes was led, by his visit to Constantinople in 1862, to the distinct conclusion that the right course for England was to see that the Turks were "fairly let alone." He was much impressed by evidences which he came across of their individual honesty, in illustra- tion of which he tells the following curious little anecdote :—

" The custom of trade here (in Constantinople) is, as every one knows, that the vendor asks twice or three times as much as be will take, and you have to beat him down to a fair price. I accompanied a lady, who had to make some purchases. After a hard struggle, she succeeded in getting what she wanted at her own price; but her adversary evidently felt aggrieved, and declared that he would be a loser by the transaction. She cast

up the total in her head, paid the money ; her cavass had taken up the things and we had left the shop, when the aggrieved merchant came out, called ns back, explained to her that she had made a wrong calculation by ten francs or so, and refunded the difference. I was much surprised," continues Mr. Hughes, "but my companion, who knows the bazaars well, assured me that it was always the case. The Turk does not care what he asks you,—often loses impatient customers by asking fabulously absurd prices, but the moment he has made his bargain is scrupulously exact in keeping to it, and will not take advantage of a farthing in changing your foreign money or of your ignorance of the value of his currency."

And the result of Mr. Hughes's inquiries was to obtain an immense preponderance of evidence which appeared to him reliable to the effect that the Turks were " decidedly the

most upright and respectable of the races who inhabit Turkey in Europe." Moreover, there had not then set in that terrible

tendency to the disappearance of high administrative ability (through the disappearance of all conspicuously able ad- ministrators) of which the British Premier had occasion to speak the other day. After distinguished services in Syria, Fuad Pasha was Grand Vizier, and his Government was "the best and strongest Turkey had seen for many a year." But while holding that in the then existing circumstances, the Turks ought to be allowed a full and fair chance, Mr.

Hughes clearly recognised the very serious risks involved in the absence among them of any class of educated men, com-

petent to fill the ordinary executive, administrative, and judicial offices. This state of things, as he pointed out, was

due to the wretched inflaemes of the harem as the place of training for Turkish boys of the upper classes; and it was essential that it should be altered. At that time, however, an effort was being made by a limited number of Turks of position and character to " break the chains of their old customs, especially this of the harem, and to conform out- wardly to Western habits and customs." This was mainly a political movement, and if it remained such, Mr. Hughes anticipated that it would probably fail. Bat, being pos- sessed by a grand old faith of the mountain-moving kind, he actually held, and had the courage to avow, the opinion that the true and not the impossible solution of the Eastern question was to be found in the conversion of the Turks to Christianity. Whatever view fin-de-siecle wisdom may take of that suggestion, it must, we think, be acknowledged that Mr. Hughes's letters from Constantinople in 1862 furnish a very strong presumption that the chapter of England's Eastern policy, which had culminated in the Treaty of Paris, was, having regard to the lights then available to us, not unworthy of a great Christian nation.

From East to West. Many of the letters in the present volume are from America, and nearly a score of these, written in 1870, describing the writer's first visit to America, were addressed not to the editor of the Spectator, but to Mrs. Hughes. They have a special interest in the account they supply of the extremely cordial reception given to Mr. Hughes, as having been one of the prominent English sympathisers with the North during the War of Secession, and of his efforts to remove or mitigate the irritation felt in the United States against this country on account of the policy of our Government, and still more the preference manifested for the Southern States by influential classes among us. The attentions paid to Mr. Hughes, everywhere warm and grateful, were conspicuously so in New England. He spent some very happy days at the house of the late Mr. Lowell, and his accounts of those days are very good to read. It is specially interesting, in view of the reserves made by Mr. Tuckerman in the book reviewed in our columns recently as to Mr. Lowell's temper, to find Mr. Hughes repeatedly saying that greatly as he admired his writings, he found the man even more attractive. " I have never," be writes in one place, " met a more agreeable talker, and his kindness to me is quite unbounded. Then he has not a grain of vanity in his composition, but is as simple and truthful as the best kind of boy."

Of Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes also Mr. Hughes writes in the warmest terms. One of the last things he did on that, his first visit to the States, was to deliver in the Music-Hall at Boston an address, which is published in the present volume, on Anglo-American relations, in which he went through the story of England's conduct during the War. While making large admissions as to the irritating and un- friendly attitude of the majority of the aristocracy and of the mercantile classes, Mr. Hughes pointed out what provocation the former had received from the habitual American attitude towards themselves as a caste, and gave a clear and fall ac- count of the great development and display of English feeling in favour of the North, led largely by influential men of the manufacturing class, such as Bright, Cobden, and Forster, but receiving also the prominent support of T. Baring, Kirk- man Hodgson, and other leading merchants, and of the Duke of Argyll, and other Liberal Peers, and taking, ultimately, such decisive shape as to affect the course of the Times. He also carefully reviewed the action of the British Government., and claimed that their offer to accept arbitration on the subject of the ' Alabama's' depredations ought to be regarded as fall reparation for any omissions which could fairly be laid to their charge. On the whole, there is reason to believe that Mr. Hughes's address, both from its warmly friendly tone, and from its clear and frank examination of the facts, and his conversation in the numerous circles into which he was welcomed, must have exercised a considerable influence upon American opinion in favour of the establishment of those intimate and cordial relations between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race which throughout the War of Secession, and ever since, it has been the steady endeavour of this journal to promote.

Space will not allow of our extending this notice of Mr. Hughes's interesting volume. But we must add that his genial frankness and fairness, lightness of touch, freshness of spirit, and breadth of sympathy, are all present in their due proportions, whether he is writing of life in the backwoods at "Rugby," Tennessee—the 'settlement being christened, we gather, when the Etonian settlers happened to be absent— of ranching in Texas, of the hardships of the herring-market at Whitby, so far as concerns the brave fishermen of the Dogger Bank, whom he naturally loves, or of the cures at Lourdes. Mr. Hughes, in a word, possesses what he some- where calls the " true holiday feeling," and it shines cheerily through these well-selected examples of his holiday-letters during the last three-and-thirty years.